British Greens responding to the intersection of anti-Zionism and antisemitism

Lone Green speaks out as Vienna’s Bundesrat hoists double standard

A Green Party member, Marco Schreuder, deputy in the 62-member Federal Council of Austria (Bundesrat), stood up as the lone dissenting voice against anti-Israel legislation passed on Monday.

The legislation singled out Israel’s anti-terror policy on detention for condemnation but – astonishingly – failed to acknowledge its neighbours’ similar or worse policies, including Syria, the paramilitary Israel-eliminationist organisations which operate on Israel’s borders, and the draconian detention measures meted out in Palestinian law to dissenters and gay people. These are well-documented by human rights organisations, feed the region’s authoritarian tendencies and it is seriously strange that they are ignored by the Bundesrat.

If the Middle East is a playground full of bullies, and you single out one bully for a kicking while leaving the other bullies to go about their violent business unhindered, then you’re obviously a bad politician. And if the bully you’re so singularly and enthusiastically attacking is Jewish, then they may reasonably feel attacked as a Jew.

Bullying is an interesting analogy because of the “cycle” of bullying. There is a cycle of violence and human rights abuses in the Middle East, fed by the West and the USA in particular.

What is important is to address our behaviour and how it feeds that cycle. We should take a strong and unequivocal stand against violence/abuses/corruption, and not pick on individuals on this aspect. However we should impose some kind of sanction on all individuals/parties/states who do not enter the internationally driven roadmap of dialogue/negotiation. It means that we must put our resources into pushing this peace process forwards (so I don’t mean the old/failed roadmap when I refer to this process). We should also reject all preconditions for commencing full and proper dialogue/negotiations: parties should not for example have to halt violence/abuses before talking (it becomes one of the tactical objectives of the talks themselves).

By starting (restarting) a new peace process founded on those grounds you would be doing something analogous to what you would need to do at a school with a chronic and endemic culture of bullying, normally adopting a methodology such as restorative justice/non-violent communication. Everything else is posturing. Let’s see who is really interested in peace.